Merton of the Movies. Harry Leon Wilson

He has started to “force his attention upon her” when Buck Benson arrives to save the day. Buck fights the villain, and eventually raises him over his head to dash him to the ground as Estelle watches in admiration. It is pure melodrama — until, that is, another voice intrudes: “Merton Gill, what in the sacred name of Time are you meanin’ to do with that dummy? For the good land’s sake! Have you gone plumb crazy, or what? Put that thing down!”

      The entire scene “on the border,” with all its stock characters and florid, melodramatic language, had been taking place in the imagination of young sales clerk Merton Gill, and the man yelling at him is his boss. The plot and language are pulled straight from the movies, and played out not in the Southwest, but in the back room of a clothing store in Ohio, where Merton is holding aloft not the Slimy Viper, but a dress dummy. Merton, it seems, has been preparing himself for a career as a movie star, seeing all the films, reading all the latest magazines (Photo Land, Silver Screenings, and Camera), posing for publicity photos, and plotting his meteoric rise with Tessie Kearns, a dressmaker who also dreams of a career in Hollywood, practicing the “difficult art” of screenwriting. Several studios have turned down her mailed-in screenplay Passions Perils, and the pals speculate that Tessie’s sets — which include Westminster Abbey and a number of castles — must be too expensive. The two also agree that while the stories of film hero Buck Benson saving the day are glorious, and historical dramas were important, slapstick comedy was not worthy of their attention. Film comedy was a lower form, they thought, one that “degraded a fine and beautiful art,” and so they would have nothing to do with it.

      Merton and Tessie do not identify at all with their small-town jobs or origins, only with the roles they imagine for themselves in the film world. Cultural forms have always been schools for selfhood, and just as scripture and heroic epics and theater and novels had provided archetypes and templates and narrative structures, so movies, even in these early days of the industry, provided aspirational models, examples of how to act, quite literally, in everyday life. In the same way that Don Quixote lives in a delirium of fictional images he has absorbed from books of chivalry, so Merton lives in a cinematic montage, his sense of his own identity a comically exaggerated version of what Wilson presents as a new movie-based notion of selfhood. Eventually, in Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) and the host of performance theories that followed, this idea of the performative self would be normalized, would be part of our background understanding, its full impact part of what the historian Warren I. Susman has described as a shift from a culture of character (producer-capitalist, Judeo-Christian, traditional, inherent, fixed) to a culture of personality (mutable, adoptable, metamorphic, acquired, reinventable, fixable by self-help and therapy), or, in other words, more or less where we find ourselves today.

      Gertrude Stein knew this — she knew that film was changing our relation to self and social life. Just before meeting Wilson, she visited Warner Brothers Studio and was shown the newsreel made of her arrival in New York. She found the experience of viewing herself on film “unaccountably alarming,” according to biographer and historian James R. Mellow. In Everybody’s Autobiography, she wrote, “I saw myself almost as large and moving around and talking I did not like it particularly the talking, it gave me a very funny feeling and I did not like that funny feeling.”

      I said earlier that when the novel opens we are in the film inside Merton’s head, but in fact there is a brief introductory paragraph:

      At the very beginning of the tale there comes a moment of puzzled hesitation. One way of approach is set beside another for choice, and a third contrived for better choice. Still the puzzle persists, all because the one precisely right way might seem — shall we say intense, high keyed, clamorous? Yet if one way is the only right way, why pause? Courage! Slightly dazed, though certain, let us be on, into the shrill thick of it. So, then —

      This seems a moment of metafiction, with the author discussing his own problems as a writer — which of course would have given Stein a kick. Or is it? Perhaps Merton, about to call “action!” in the movie in his mind, was simply crafting decisions about the plot. Or perhaps, of course, both — both Wilson’s metafiction and Merton’s process — and more than that, as the invocation of “us” in the end suggests. The choice of how to be in the world, of how to present a self, of how to understand our own stories, had expanded dramatically — we, the readers then and now, no longer need to remain a store clerk in Ohio; we can be anything, anybody — and that imagining of ourselves and our possibilities, just as it had been directed by the epic and novel and theater for centuries, was now being shaped, for anyone with a nickel and nearby movie theater, by film. We have met Merton, and he is us.

      And yet, at the same time, he is not. For most readers today, it will be depressing or distressing (or both) to read the casually brutal racism of yesteryear: “white” is a synonym for honesty, “Chinaman” for dishonesty, and Mexicans are invariably evil — witness the Slimy Viper himself, Snake le Vazquez. There is a “wooden Indian proffering cigars,” a “cast-iron effigy of a small Negro” jockey on a front lawn, a “dozen villainous Asiatics,” and stereotype after stereotype in unconcerned procession. Everyone from the Midwest is, invariably, a dullard, especially Merton himself, with only the cosmopolitans on the coasts, like Flips Montague, keyed into the new world. Wilson and his audience can congratulate themselves for being modern cosmopolitans and not oblivious hicks, can pat themselves on the back for overturning the cultural hierarchies of their Victorian predecessors, but as is always the case, they remain provincial still, and miles short of our current consensus.

      When Merton first walks onto the studio lot, he is amazed at the wide world it represents, with outdoor sets that perfectly mimic New York, and others Baghdad.

      Then he explored farther and felt curiously disappointed at finding that these structures were to real houses what a dicky is to a sincere, genuine shirt. They were pretentiously false.

      One had but to step behind them to discover them as poor shells.

      At moments like this — and perhaps this is why Stein was impressed, too — Wilson seems aware that this new sense of self was doomed, that it was hollow, a false front. Actually seeing ourselves on film, rather than imagining ourselves in one, as Stein saw, produces estrangement. The age of anxiety, the age of the lonely crowd, is right around the next historical corner, and the performed self will start to be reinterpreted not as freedom, but as a burden, as a poor shell. But for the moment, still early in the 1920s, Merton’s movie-made self was an exuberant comic corrective, a path away from a fusty past and into a future arriving fast.

      CHAPTER I

      DIRTY WORK AT THE BORDER

      AT THE VERY BEGINNING of the tale there comes a moment of puzzled hesitation. One way of approach is set beside another for choice, and a third contrived for better choice. Still the puzzle persists, all because the one precisely right way might seem — shall we say intense, high keyed, clamorous? Yet if one way is the only right way, why pause? Courage! Slightly dazed, though certain, let us be on, into the shrill thick of it. So, then —

      Out there in the great open spaces where men are men, a clash of primitive hearts and the coming of young love into its own! Well had it been for Estelle St. Clair if she had not wandered from the Fordyce ranch. A moment’s delay in the arrival of Buck Benson, a second of fear in that brave heart, and hers would have been a fate worse than death.

      Had she not been warned of Snake le Vasquez, the outlaw — his base threat to win her by fair means or foul? Had not Buck Benson himself, that strong, silent man of the open, begged her to beware of the half-breed? Perhaps she had resented the hint of mastery in Benson’s cool, quiet tones as he said, “Miss St. Clair, ma’am, I beg you not to endanger your welfare by permitting the advances of this viper. He bodes no good to such as you.”

      Perhaps — who knows? — Estelle St. Clair had even thought to trifle with the feelings of Snake le Vasquez, then to scorn him for his presumption. Although the beautiful New York society girl had remained unsullied in the midst of a city’s profligacy, she still liked “to play with fire,” as she laughingly said, and at the quiet words of Benson — Two-Gun Benson his comrades of the border called him — she had drawn herself to her full height, facing him